NUMERAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN SPOKEN ITALIAN AND SPANISH: FROM QUANTITATIVE APPROXIMATION TO INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

In this article I will present the most common numeral constructions in spoken Italian and Spanish for quantity approximation, based on the corpora of spoken Italian VoLIP (Voghera et al. 2014), spoken Spanish Val.ES.Co. (http://www.valesco.es/) and the Italian and Spanish sections of the C-ORAL-ROM (Cresti & Moneglia (eds.) 2005). I have analysed the contexts with the presence of numerals from 1 to 10, to which I will refer in the course of this work as small numerals, and the contexts with the presence of numerals 20, 25, 50, 100, 500, 1000, 50,000, 100,000, one million, one billion, to which I will refer as large numerals. I will take into consideration here the approximation that is achieved through the exclusive use of cardinal numerals and not the one in which the numerals occur together with other approximators, such as adverbs (circa, hacía, più o meno, más o menos ‘about, more or less’ etc.), or colloquial large numbers, such as the Spanish veintetantos, tropecientos, tropecientos mil. Section 2 presents a description of the lexical and syntactic properties of the constructions; section 3 analyses the functions of constructions, comparing in particular those with small numerals and those with large numerals.